The Future of Social Mobility
Instituto de Investigaciones Gino Germani, Universidad de Buenos Aires, CONICET
2025-12-03
International (Hout & DiPrete, 2006):
- Social mobility shows a common pattern, but its strength varies across countries and over time.
- Education is the main factor driving both upward mobility and the intergenerational reproduction of status.
Latin America (Torche, 2015; Solís y Boado, 2016):
- High absolute rates of intergenerational class mobility, comparable to those in today’s industrialized countries.
- Upward mobility did not always translate into higher incomes.
- Overall social fluidity is similar to that of European countries.
- Weak link between inequality and mobility.
Diagnosis:
There is a gap between how sociology defines class or occupational mobility and how people understand “social mobility” in their everyday lives.
What do people understand as upward or downward mobility? Class? Income? Housing? Consumption? Education? Lifestyle?
Subjective social mobility:
Allows for addressing the multidimensionality of social mobility.
Captures a broader range of experiences.
Reflects a cognitive average of objective mobility trajectories.
Objective and subjective mobility do not always align.
Possible indicator of relative deprivation.
Is a better predictor of attitudes, behaviors, health, and well-being.
Objective: To explore the relationship between objective indicators of stratification (class and social mobility) and subjective mobility in Argentina.
Data sources:
Comparative Analysis: World Values Survey (WVS) and Latinobarómetro.
Argentina: National Survey on Argentina’s Social Structure and Equality Policies (ESAyPI, PIRC-ESA, 2024)
World Values Survey: direct question on subjective mobility
Latinobarómetro: indirect question on subjective mobility
Direct vs. indirect measurement:
Argentina:
Objective and subjective class positions correlate only weakly with subjective mobility.
Objective mobility does not necessarily translate into subjective mobility (status inconsistency / spurious mobility).
Evidence of a self-serving bias in causal attribution (Structural and merit-based factors).
Next steps:
jrodriguez@conicet.gov.ar
https://github.com/joserodriguez86
Social mobility in the stratification process
Mobility studies commonly focus on the relationship between origins and destinations (2).
It is often assumed that the relationship between positions and outcomes (1) is constant, even though it actually changes over time.
Economists simplified this issue by focusing directly on income mobility.